“Be prepared to zigzag, because life does not always turn out like you think it’s going to turn out, and that’s true on the personal side, too. When life throws you a curveball, it’s O.K. to grieve. But don’t take too long, because you’ve got to get back up on your feet and then maybe focus on Plan B.”

“High prices are a natural reflection of great demand and scant supply. In a free market, in which private individuals can engage in mutually advantageous gains from trade, they are inevitable until demand subsides or supply expands.”

“Laughter at its purest and most spontaneous is affiliative and bonding. To our forebears it meant, ‘We’re not going to kill each other! What a relief!’ But as we’ve developed as humans so has our repertoire of laughter, unleashed to achieve ends quite apart from its original function of telling friend from foe.”

“There is a document that has the back histories of every single character, where they went to school, their upbringing, everything about them. What’s not written is any dialogue. And there’s no rehearsal. But the actors know what happens in every single scene. This is more rigid than you can imagine. It takes longer to lay this out than to write a conventional screenplay.”

“‘I don’t miss late-night television,’ he said. ‘And I’m a little embarrassed that, for 33 years, it was the laser focus of my life.… It took a lot of energy, and it probably would have been better expended elsewhere. Now it just seems like, really, that’s what you did?’”

“In the early days of the web, art was frequently a cause and the internet was an alternate universe in which to pursue it. Two decades later, preserving this work has become a mission. As web browsers and computer operating systems stopped supporting the software tools they were built with, many works have fallen victim to digital obsolescence.”

“From the air it looks like a green carpet, gouged southwest to northeast by glaciers. From the water it looks like another time — when nature was not a thing that grew at the edge of civilization, but a world unto itself in which humans were guests.”

“This moral courage equated with ruthlessness, a steely ability to send men to die. Yet he often erupted in rage when he saw animals mistreated. For a biographer, such contradictions present an opportunity to depict a round character, in E.M. Forster’s sense, one who can surprise the reader convincingly. But Grant made it hard to find organic unity in his disunity.”

“Most of Marie Ponsot’s career has been belated. Her first book was published in the City Lights Pocket Poets series in 1956, when she was already 35 — late, but not as late as Frost or Stevens. Her next, not until she was 60. Now 95, she has continued to publish a book every decade or so, as if she had all the time in the world. Collected Poems is the model for every poet who worships procrastination.”

“McCarthy reports that Britain has lost half its biodiversity in only 50 years, and the reason for much of this destruction is farming. Unlike in the United States, where agriculture and wilderness have long been separated, in Britain wildlife coexisted for centuries with farmland — hedgerows, meadows and ponds, for example, provided habitats. Then after the Second World War came new technology, modern farming techniques and chemicals — combined with the knowledge that Germany had almost cut off Britain’s food supplies during the war. Never again, the British thought, and farmers were given price guarantees to encourage home production. Suddenly even the most marginal land was considered arable, and chemicals were dumped on the fields. Birds, insects, otters, wildflowers — all gone.”

“Tune into yours right now: What are you hearing? Who’s speaking, and when did the conversation begin? This is ambiguous territory. Measuring one’s own private soundtrack is hard enough. Now add in the confounding element of other people’s, too.”

“Art is constantly in the business of manipulating our emotions, as if this were an end in itself. This, after all, was Plato’s objection to the arts and every kind of artistic effect — that it was manipulative and potentially mendacious. Or simply a waste: ‘How often,’ Montaigne asks, ‘do we encumber our spirits with yellow bile or sadness by means of such shadows?’”

“Mike is a deep believer in the idea that ‘kids have to find their own balance of power.’ He wants his boys to create their own society governed by its own rules. He consciously transformed his family’s house into a kid hangout, spreading the word that local children were welcome to play in the yard anytime, even when the family wasn’t home. Discontented with the expensive, highly structured summer camps typical of the area, Mike started one of his own: Camp Yale, named after his street, where the kids make their own games and get to roam the neighborhood.”

“Beauvoir is remembered as a philosopher, feminist and novelist, not as an outdoorswoman, and yet pages of her memoirs are taken up with descriptions of the hikes she took in her 20s and 30s: in the Maritime Alps, the Haute-Loire, in Brittany, in the Jura, in Auvergne, in the Midi. Since the publication of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild or even Robyn Davidson’s Tracks, it has become commonplace to see the solo excursion in the wilderness as a possible experience of feminine catharsis. Beauvoir abhorred sentimentalism in her writing and seemed constitutionally incapable of contriving a sudden epiphany after cresting a peak, but it turns out that in addition to all of her philosophical contributions she is a forgotten pioneer of this genre of memoir.”

“Novelists are like fur trappers. They disappear into the north woods for months or years at a time, sometimes never to reemerge, giving in to despair out there, or going native (taking a real job, in other words), or catching their legs in their own traps and bleeding out, silently, into the snow. The lucky ones return, laden with pelts.”

“From the historical sense that, throughout the American experiment, very little has been possible for black people; to a generational sense that, despite a great deal of change in American society through time, a great deal still isn’t possible; to Marshall’s personal sense that, nonetheless, everything is possible: That’s the short version of the story that his work has been telling — mostly in paint but also in sculpture, photography and installations — since he became the first member of his family to go to college, graduating from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles in 1978.”